Random Bits of Software

Just Hand Over the Mail - A Simple POP3 Client

This script now has its own page.

Bluetooth Remote Control

Various ImageJ Plugins

Various plugins that I've written for Wayne Rasband's public domain image processing package ImageJ can be found on my ed.ac.uk web space.

Drawing Protein Domain Graphs

Also hosted at Edinburgh, you can find a script for drawing protein domain diagrams from RPS-BLAST output.

Crossword Generation

I've made some small changes to Lars Christensen's crossword compiler, "cwc", which you can find here.

Unicode Characters Screensaver

[This is a new version; I accidentally left tracing on in 0.3]

This screensaver displays large glyphs corresponding to randomly chosen Unicode characters. It captions each glyph with the Unicode name, or a definition in the case of unified Han characters.

At the moment, you need Windows 2000 or Windows XP to run this. You'll also need to have Arial Unicode MS installed. There are some other known bugs and caveats mentioned in the README. The current version is 0.4. If you were using 0.2, you should install this instead - 0.2 had a GDI resource leak.

impatient

This is a trivial script, but one that I've found occasionally useful when writing other scripts. I gather you can do the same kind of thing with expect, but that seems like slight overkill to me.

Usage: impatient <timeout-seconds> <return-value-on-timeout> <command>

   Returns <command>'s return code if it completed in
   <timeout-seconds>, or <return-value-on-timeout> otherwise.

Java Puzzle Bobble

There are far too many Java versions of Puzzle Bobble (The Best Computer Game Ever) on the web as it is. The only things that really distinguish this version are that:

I've paid very close attention to getting the gameplay and rules exactly like the arcade machine version I used to play.
The levels are described by a very simple text file, so you can add your own easily. The level file should be easy to work out. (Actually, I'll add some documentation for it soon.)

There's no source code available for this, since some parts of the graphics layer are copyright Ideaworks3D Ltd. or Eben Upton (I'm not quite sure which.)

IP Address Watcher

This is ip-up and ip-down for Windows, essentially. The web page for this application is here.

London Underground Scripting

This archive has a small Ruby script which finds all the possible minimal tube line tours (as used in Dave's one stop tube flush pub crawl.) It only might be useful to you if you need the tube in an easy to use graph-like data structure. The files listing all the adjacent stations on each line was pretty dull to generate as well.

StepMania Statistics Analysis

I wrote a Ruby script to parse StepMania's Stats.xml file and produce valid HTML 4 Strict for inclusion into a progress page like this one. You need to have md5sum, Imagemagick and the Ruby REXML library installed for it to work. The output looks pretty ugly without some CSS, but most of the HTML elements have useful CSS class names. The bugs and TODOs are:

At the moment I'm excluding the couple of "long version" songs I have and the Disney songs by matching on the names and directories in SongLocation.exclude? which is a bit nasty, so if you have lots of long versions you'll have to exclude them individually there.
I parse out the information about the number of "Perfects", "Greats", etc. but don't display it currently. It'd be nice to generate small graphs using GD or something
It should indicate how many further uncleared songs in each class there are, say "Top N" best scores, etc.
I should add some javascript to hide the tables, probably...

If you actually use this script and find it useful, please let me know. I've only tested it with StepMania-3.9-rc1 (and even then not very much.)